Intentional Living in the Second Half

SPINNING THROUGH THE THICK AND THE THIN

By Lisa Huddleston

This is not a creative or artistic or poetic attempt. What this post is is simply an informative and hopefully encouraging word for any of my readers who understand what it means to have chronic depression–or maybe any chronic illness.

For the fifth time, I am going through an adjustment period with yet another antidepressant. As the fourth one leaves my system, the fifth is building, and I am experiencing the not-so-lovely effects of nausea, irritability, anxiety, weepiness, self-hatred, and so on. Is it due to losing the previous med or introducing the latest? Who knows? And really who ever knows why exactly they are feeling as they are?

One dear friend calls me a warrior and refers to my experience as a battle. I guess she is right in some ways, but I really just feel more like a crappy scrap of paper being blown whichever way the wind goes.

If this new drug (to me) works–Yay! Maybe I will finally settle down and rest in some semblance of peace.

If it does not–and odds are that it will work some but not without the sad side effects of numbing my brain–I am considering an entirely new approach. Maybe I’ll write about it some time. Time will tell.

But as I wait and see, I am learning to spin yarn from raw wool. (Just go with me here. No segue–I know.) Naturally I see the similarities between this attempt and the other. I see connections between everything!

My first yarn barely resembled yarn at all. It was wooly fat blobs, thin stringy spirals, and spots that wouldn’t hold together when given even a slight tug. Fat, strung-out, and falling apart. (Mm hm.)

Now I am actually spinning real yarn. Not perfectly but better nearly every time I sit down at the wheel. Am I a yarn warrior yet? Perhaps not, but I have sweat and cursed enough to feel battle worn and torn by the learning process. And victory is in sight.

A long obedience in the same direction is the only possibility for victory. Keep spinning, my fellow warriors. So will I.